Playing The Fool
by Shyrstyne
Summary: Short 07Movie. Mikayla introspect. Yes, I thought of it while reading Hamlet. No, that isn't necessarily a good thing.


Playing The Fool

I am not happy with this. Poorly written, not thought through at all. This is me at my worst. As usual, I put it up because I feel like it, and because I thought it was a good idea at the time.

_**Playing The Fool**_

Mikayla hadn't been old enough to remember her mother.

She wasn't entirely sure what had happened to her either. She didn't really want to ask, and nobody seemed very keen on just telling her, so she went her life not knowing at all what had happened to her other parent.

Not that it had ever mattered much. She had her father, she had her grandmother, and that was all that really mattered in life.

For a while anyways.

"It's just for a while sweetie. Just until we can get back on our feet, alright?"

That was what he had told her. She'd been very young then, two… maybe three years old. There had been no work to be found, and what little savings they had were drying up quickly. So, in a last ditch effort to keep his family off the street, her father had put his mechanical skills to use in less than legal ways. Her Grandmother –much more spry at the time- had also put great effort into trying to earn money for them, though she refused to stoop to criminal means. Sometimes Mikayla wondered if her Grandmother had even known what her father had been doing.

Nonetheless, a few weeks turned into a few months, a few months turned into years… and like all criminals, eventually the police caught up to them.

The consequences had been chaotic and stressful, and after what seemed like forever, Mikayla ended up with a juv. record, in the care of her quickly aging grandmother, and a father in prison.

It was shortly after that Mikayla learned that fitting in was the best way to go.

Her first boyfriend had found out about her talent with vehicles several months into their relationship. He had, surprisingly, been fairly impressed. He'd commended on her skills, constantly assuring her that he didn't mind, and that was okay. Flattering really. He doted on her, and she felt the swellings of pride for a time. Then he learned just where she had learned those skills.

At which point he completely turned on her. The months after that had gone to Hell in a hand basket, and only her own quick thinking and his moving to another city kept her mercifully below radar. Her next boyfriend hadn't taken well to her skills at all. After that she resolutely kept it secret, vowing to never tell another soul.

For several years Mikayla's worst fear was that someone would call her out on who she was and what she had done, her own fault or not. The only solution that she could readily recognize was to disappear. Quietly, she integrated herself with the jocks and cheerleaders, put on makeup every morning, and generally made herself as normal as possible. Nobody noticed.

At first, she was merely another girl who hung out with the cheerleaders, nothing to be noticed. But as time went on, she found herself called into conversations, hit on by most of the jock population, and invited to more and more parties. She put more effort into her appearance, and her grades began to gradually sink. Her former low ninety's fell below 85 and continued to decline. Nothing drastic, nothing to be worried over, and certainly not anywhere near failing, but still dropping. One or two teachers noticed, but that was all.

She never saw the change.

Her friends –and boyfriends- intelligence levels seemed to drop as time went on. By the time she hit high school, their collective IQ could have been scrunched into a large nutshell.

And she never noticed.

She found herself laughing at stupid jokes, listening intensively to conversations her old self would have found incomprehensibly dull, and hanging off the arm of whatever jock happened to be nearby. Makeup and doing her hair was suddenly very important, and she found herself shelling out the money to get her ears pierced. Everything outside what had become her world was automatically uncool, and thus, not worthy of her attention. Sometimes she would see it all for what it was, but as time went on, it happened less and less and her world continued to shrink.

"Do… Do you think I'm shallow?"

It wasn't until Sam drove up in that ratty old camaro that she really thought about what she was doing in life. It wasn't until she got out of that car that she decided that something really needed to change.

She was done being somebody else's person. It wasn't going to be easy, but she had reconditioned herself once, she would just have to do it again. And for some odd, inexplicable reason, she had a feeling that Sam Witwicky and his ratty old Camaro would help her do just that.

And so help her Mikayla swore she would never play the fool again.


End file.
